THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 21, 2016 45
a poor self-image.' If a man makes fun
of himself, it's a joke. If a woman does,
it's a pathology and she needs therapy."
In an age of Lena Dunham and Amy
Schumer, that doesn't happen anymore.
Chris, though, is still one of few fe-
male comic losers in literature. Her cat-
alogue of failures and disappointments
is not confined to her romantic life. In
"Aliens & Anorexia," her husband won-
ders why "anyone with so little visual
imagination" would ever want to be a
filmmaker. In "Torpor," the wife, Syl-
vie, asks the downtown photographer
Nan Goldin to provide a blurb for one
of her videos. Goldin agrees, mostly as
a favor to Sylvie's prominent husband,
but then says that she didn't under-
stand the film. "Unhelpfully, Sylvie
explained how she'd collapsed a
page Henry James novel and Bataille's
Blue of Noon into one twelve-minute
movie. . . . 'Oh, right,' Nan had said. 'I
guess it's not much of a narrative.' "
Kraus told me, "I just reread 'Through
a Scanner Darkly,' and the Philip K.
Dick character is always this kind of
goofball loser. He's a radio repairman.
He's a terrible husband. He's a total
schmuck. So why can there not be a
female antihero?" Until recently, a comic
female antihero was nearly inconceiv-
able. There's nothing funny about fail-
ing if you've been overwhelmingly ob-
structed by sexism and social conven-
tions. If you want to make people laugh,
you really have to fail on your own mer-
its.The comedy of "I Love Dick" shows
us an overlooked milestone. Some-
where between second-class status and
full equality, there is a point at which
women are expected to make their own
way in the world, as men do. How can
we tell that we've passed this milestone?
It's not by the presence of a few suc-
cessful women like, say, Nan Goldin,
but by the widespread feelings of in-
adequacy, envy, and anxiety that a suc-
cess like Goldin's inspires in her peers
like Chris. This is existential freedom,
and this is where the female antihero
comes in.
K in the Bronx in
. Her father, Oswald Kraus,
worked as the head of a distribution
center for Cambridge University Press.
Kraus's mother worked in various cler-
ical jobs to help pay the bills. When
Kraus was five and her sister, Carol,
was two, the family moved to the blue-
collar town of Milford, Connecticut,
to shorten her father's commute. The
Krauses were antiwar liberals in a town
of munitions-factory workers and sup-
porters of the war in Vietnam. Kraus
was teased and beaten by her peers. In
junior high, she started skipping school
and hitchhiking to New Haven to at-
tend antiwar protests and hang around
Yale.
In , the Krauses applied for as-
sisted passage to New Zealand, where
the government had recently launched
a relocation program to entice skilled
immigrants. "My parents dreamed of
a gentler kind of universally lower-
middle-class society," Kraus told me.
"Medical bills would be covered, they
would be in a less hostile environment,
and any question of paying for college
would also be resolved."They were the
first Americans accepted to the pro-
gram, and flew to New Zealand at the
end of the year, shortly before Kraus
turned fifteen. Prime Minister John
Marshall greeted them when they got
o the plane at Wellington.
As a teen-ager, Kraus loved acting.
She finished high school early and, at
sixteen, entered the Victoria Univer-
sity of Wellington. She spent her spare
time in the library, poring over the
The Drama Review, an American jour-
nal of avant-garde theatre and per-
formance art. In her second year, she
won a scholarship that included a job
writing for the Wellington Dominion,
one of the city's two main newspa-
pers, and after graduation she worked
as a features reporter and, later, a TV
critic for the Evening Post. But she
wanted to be an artist, and, in ,
when she was twenty-one, Kraus moved
to New York and settled in the East
Village.
Her plan was to study acting while
supporting herself with freelance writ-
ing, but she had trouble getting assign-
ments, so she took a series of tempo-
rary jobs and started taking acting
workshops with the avant-garde the-
atre pioneer Richard Schechner, the
actress Ruth Maleczech, and the di-
rector Lee Breuer. She worked hard
but was not among their most prom-
ising students.
Kraus's East Village experiences bear
little resemblance to those described
by Patti Smith in "Just Kids" and Rich-
ard Hell in "I Dreamed I Was a Very
Clean Tramp," which tell of adventur-
ous young people whose artistic risks
are quickly rewarded. "The people writ-
ing the memoirs are artists who were
very much visible in their twenties and
early thirties," Kraus notes, while her
own New York story is about living in
squalor without the success. "I was in-
visible. I was the person that I describe
in 'I Love Dick,' this very shy, asexual
woman, bad teeth, not a good haircut,
not the right clothes. I would go to all
these cultural events alone, badly dressed,
feeling kind of weird because I didn't
really know anyone."
Kraus met Lotringer in , when
she wrote and staged a performance
piece called "Disparate Action/Des-
perate Action," in which she gave a
monologue "conflating 'Middlemarch' 's
Dorothea Brooke and the German left-
wing terrorist Ulrike Meinhof." Kraus
wrote letters inviting "ten famous peo-
ple" to see the play: "Susan Sontag,
Richard Foreman---people I would
have liked to meet but didn't have a
way to meet." Kraus was a fan of Se-
miotext(e), so she invited Lotringer,
and he came. They had a brief a air,
then ran into each other three years
later, at a poetry reading at the French
Embassy, and started to see each other
more regularly.
By then, Kraus was tired of menial
jobs and bohemian poverty. "It was,
like, either I have to go back to New
Zealand or I have to go to law school.
I can't live this way anymore," she
said. "I was in my late twenties and I
had no medical insurance. I was a total
wreck, and something had to change."
Lotringer's university salary and med-
ical benefits helped support her. He
also introduced her to the writers
she read late at night: Julia Kristeva,
Jean Baudrillard. "The whole world of
French intellectual culture---I had in-
haled it since I was a teen-ager." Kraus
discovered that Lotringer's last serious
girlfriend had been Kathy Acker, a